How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon - Softcover

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Rosa Brooks is a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, a columnist for Foreign Policy, and a law professor at Georgetown University. She previously worked at the Pentagon as Counselor to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy; in 2011, she was awarded the Secretary of Defense Medal for Outstanding Public Service. Brooks has also served as a senior advisor at the US Department of State, a consultant for Human Rights Watch, and a weekly opinion columnist for the Los Angeles Times. Her articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and dozens of other newspapers and magazines, and she is a frequent television guest, with appearances on the Charlie Rose Show, the Rachel Maddow Show, the Today show, Meet the Press, and Erin Burnett OutFront. Brooks lives in Alexandria, Virginia, with her husband Joe, her daughters Anna and Clara, and a Brittany spaniel named Scout.

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How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything

CHAPTER ONE

Pirates!

Everything Was Strange

Telling people that I was going to work at the Pentagon felt like saying that I was going to work at the Death Star, or that I’d have an office inside the Sphinx. It took me weeks to shake off the slight feeling of unreality that hit me each time I entered the world’s largest office building. Did I work here? How very strange.

Everything about the Pentagon was strange. My mother, visiting me for lunch, gaped at the Pentagon’s food courts, banks, and shops. “The heart of American military power is a shopping mall?” she asked. Once you got past the shops clustered by the Metro entrance, the Pentagon’s corridors were endless and echoing, lined with closed metal doors flanked by keypads and stern printed warnings: “No cell phones, cameras or other recording devices.” Uniformed men and women strode about decisively, heels clicking on the shiny floors. The Pentagon had a unique scent too, some mix of cleaning fluids, wood polish, floor wax, coffee, and human stress, amplified by the canned air protecting its denizens from biological and chemical infiltration. Every time I walked in through the wide doors, the scent washed over me.

The windows in the E Ring’s outward-facing offices, which house many of the most senior officials, were made of a curious green glass. I never learned the details, but I assume the thick green glass was bulletproof, or blast proof, or surveillance proof, or all those things. Regardless, from within, the green glass gave an odd chartreuse tint to the world outside the Pentagon—the endless acres of parking lots, the yacht basin, the Potomac River—and beyond, the monuments and stately buildings of official Washington. Gazing through those windows, I felt like Dorothy in the Emerald City.

There were peculiar exhibits everywhere: lurid paintings of fighter planes, elaborate dioramas illustrating the life of General Douglas MacArthur, glass-fronted displays of World War II code-breaking machines. The grand staircase leading up from the Pentagon’s elegant River Entrance boasted a vast oil painting—perhaps six feet by ten—of a uniformed airman and his family kneeling at a chapel altar, rapt faces lit from above by a shaft of sunlight coming through a stained-glass window. In case the viewer was particularly obtuse, the inscription beneath the painting clarified the message: “And the Lord God asked, ‘Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?’ And the reply came back: ‘Here I am, send me.’ ” Kitsch—but sanctified kitsch.

Ahoy, Matey!

When I first started work at the Pentagon, it seemed that I had walked into some kind of permanent Talk Like a Pirate Week. Meetings opened with cries of “Ahoy, matey!,” “Avast, me hearties!,” and merry threats to make latecomers walk the plank. Occasionally, you even saw someone sporting a black eye patch or a rakish bandana.

Whatever I had expected about my new job at the heart of American military power, it wasn’t this. But on April 8, 2009—less than a week before I started my new job in the Office of the Secretary of Defense—four young Somali pirates had boarded the merchant vessel Maersk Alabama, making it the first U.S.-flagged ship to be seized by pirates in nearly two hundred years. They demanded ransom money, but on April 12, Navy SEAL snipers shot and killed three of the pirates, rescuing Richard Phillips, the Maersk Alabama’s American captain, and capturing the fourth pirate.

The very next day, I started work at the Pentagon, surrounded by giddy military bureaucrats cracking pirate jokes.

And it was funny—sort of. Pirates! Who’da thunk it? And who could blame hardworking Pentagon action officers for uttering some celebratory cries of “Avast, me hearties”? For years, the Pentagon had struggled through the bloody and inconclusive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. After a decade of suicide bombs and dead civilians, how nice to have an uncomplicated success story. How nice to be the good guys, rescuing American citizens and ships from the bad guys.

He Caught a Big Fish

Admittedly, it wasn’t exactly a fair fight: the four Somali pirates were scruffy, undernourished teenage boys. They were poor and untrained: the sole pirate to survive his encounter with the SEALs was Abdiwali Abdiqadir Muse, the oldest of twelve children from a Puntland family that got by on a few dollars a day. Muse grew up in a one-room home. His mother sold milk at the market; his father herded goats and camels.1 Interviewed after their rescue, members of the Maersk Alabama’s crew recalled Muse’s astonished delight at discovering he had unwittingly gained control of an American ship: “He kept asking, `You all come from America?’ Then he claps and cheers and smiles. He caught himself a big fish.”2

The fish was much too big for Muse, a scrawny kid of 5'2". His family told journalists that he was only sixteen, and had been duped by older criminals into trying his hand at piracy.3 But he had no birth certificate (few Somalis do), and after a medical examination, U.S. authorities asserted that he was probably nineteen rather than sixteen. Either way, Muse and his dreams of a hefty ransom bonanza were no match for U.S. Navy SEALs.

Notwithstanding the jokes, the Navy assault on the Maersk Alabama pirates was in many ways a typical twenty-first-century military engagement. U.S. forces increasingly find themselves fighting nontraditional enemies: pirates, terrorists, insurgents, organized crime networks, and other actors who pose asymmetric challenges to conventional U.S. military power. Today, America’s adversaries rarely engage in battles over territorial control. They’d be fools to do so, given conventional U.S. military dominance. Instead, they use kidnapping, hijacking, sabotage, theft, propaganda videos, computer hacking, suicide bombs, and IEDs to cause disruption and damage to U.S. interests.

Sometimes America’s adversaries have the overt or covert backing of foreign states; sometimes they are nonstate groups acting alone. Sometimes their motives are ideological or political; sometimes purely financial. The threats they pose are real, but difficult to quantify or categorize and still more difficult to combat. You can “win” a war against Nazi Germany, but how do you win against shifting, inchoate extremist networks with little interest in controlling physical terrain, or roving bands of hungry young African pirates seeking ransom money?

No one at the Pentagon was quite sure, but Congress, galvanized by the Maersk Alabama incident, was demanding answers—and my boss, Michèle Flournoy, was supposed to provide them. In the absence of a designated speechwriter, she turned to me to draft her testimony.

•  •  •

Although I had worked at the State Department, I had no experience on Capitol Hill, and at that point I had never drafted nor given congressional testimony. But I was an international law scholar, and knew something about the intertwined history of piracy and international law. For sure, I thought, Congress would want to know about this too.

So my draft testimony began with a capsule history of piracy and law, cribbed...